It’s the question on the minds of Florida citrus growers and officials before the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases its first estimate of the state’s 2017-18 citrus crop at noon today. The USDA reported last season’s orange crop at 68.75 million boxes, the grapefruit crop at 7.76 million boxes and tangerines and tangelos at 1.62 million boxes.

Sparks’ “40 million-box question” represents his rough estimate of what the USDA will report as the size of the 2017-18 orange crop after it sustained a major hit from Hurricane Irma on Sept. 10 and 11. It lies in the middle of the range of projections among growers and economists who spoke to The Ledger this week about the pending citrus-harvesting season.

“My feeling is we’re looking at 35 million boxes,” said Allen Morris, a Winter Haven-based agribusiness consultant and economist who follows Florida citrus.

“I would be shocked if it would be higher than 50 million boxes,” said Tom Spreen, emeritus professor of agriculture economics at the University of Florida and an authority on the industry’s economics.

A crop of 40 million orange boxes would be the lowest in 75 years, according to USDA statistics.

The state produced 36.65 million boxes that season followed by 45.5 million boxes in 1943-44. The Florida harvest has never fallen below 40 million orange boxes since and peaked at 244 million boxes in 1997-98.

Amid the uncertainty, all agreed on one forecast: Almost nobody will make money when the picking stops in May, if not sooner because of the small crop.

“Not on this peninsula,” said Doug Bournique, executive director of the Indian River Citrus League, which represents mostly grapefruit growers in six Southeast Florida counties. “The production cost is so high, you need every penny (from fruit sales). If you take 20-30-40 percent of that crop off, I don’t see how you make any money.”

Spreen agreed.

“For a guy who suffered minor crop loss, he may come out OK, but that’s not the average grower,” he said.

This season’s historically low crop threatens the financial viability of everyone involved in Florida citrus, from the growers to juice processors to fresh citrus packing houses. Processors buy about 95 percent of the annual orange crop and about 60 percent of the state’s grapefruit with the rest going to packinghouses for the fresh market.

Irma has already claimed one victim among the latter.

The Haines City Citrus Growers Association had announced in the spring it would operate for 2017-18 while it seeks a buyer for its plant and equipment. Following Irma, the board of directors agreed to close permanently, said Dennis Broadaway, the association’s chief executive.

“When the storm hit and put all that fruit on the ground, it was painfully obvious that it was not going to work,” he said. “We felt that with 40 (percent) to 50 percent of the fruit on the ground, it wouldn’t behoove us to operate this facility. That’s not enough fruit.”

Established in 1909, Haines City Growers had operated one of the state’s largest packinghouses as recently as the 2013-14 season, when it packed and sold more than 1 million cartons of fruit, the eighth highest volume in Florida. The association will remain in business as a grove caretaking and harvesting company, Broadaway said.

The news is better at Florida’s Natural Growers, the juice-processing cooperative in Lake Wales that’s the third largest U.S. retailer of orange juice, said Broadaway, chairman of the cooperative’s board of directors.

Florida’s Natural markets its brand OJ products as the only ones made entirely from Florida oranges. The top two OJ sellers – Tropicana Products Inc., a Pepsico Inc. subsidiary, and Minute Maid, a Coca-Cola brand – blend Florida and imported orange juice.

That will follow even more so in 2017-18, Florida citrus sources agreed, and few expected the numbers to go up.

That’s because, in addition to Irma blowing oranges, grapefruit and tangerines off the trees during the storm and in the days following, the storm dumped massive amounts of rain across the Florida peninsula. That particularly affected groves in Southeast and Southwest Florida, which remained flooded for up to five days, growers reported.

“I don’t know of anybody in this region is going to end the season in the black,” said Ron Hamel, chief executive of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, which represents growers in five southwestern counties, who sustained average losses of 75 percent to 80 percent of their crops.

Groves along the Central Florida Ridge, including Polk County, mostly escaped flooding because of the sandy soil.

Lake Wales-based grower Marty McKenna agreed. His company manages several thousand grove acres in Southwest Florida that were inundated for several days, he said.

“The drop is continuing,” McKenna said. “We’re counting Valencia oranges in our worst hit groves on Monday, and every Monday there’s more fruit on the ground than there was the previous Monday.”

The standing water damaged the trees’ roots, growers said, and they will not likely recover by the end of the season.

“Growers tell us the trees will never be as productive as they were (before flooding),” Sparks said. “At the end of the season, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 35-to-40-million-box orange crop.”

Citrus Mutual is lobbying the federal government for a $760.8 million relief package, the value of the 2017-18 crop lost to Irma determined by a Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services study, Sparks added. The study estimated the state’s total agriculture losses at $2.5 billion, including cattle, nurseries and other fruit and vegetable crops.

Following the 2004 hurricanes that ravaged Florida agriculture, the USDA offered $500 million in disaster assistance.

Although farm prices have increased following the hurricane, that won’t make up for citrus-crop losses, Spreen said.

“I think we’re definitely in the scenario where the price goes up less than the crop goes down,” he said.

The federal assistance helped many Florida growers survive in 2004-05, when the state’s citrus industry was much healthier, said Vic Story, a Lake Wales-based grower.

“We were counting on this season to be one of those catch-up years,” he said. “Now it’s not a catch-up year, it’s a trying-to-survive year.”